Suites for Solo Cello on the Later Label – Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2021

The discussion here is for a Oval label copy of Suites for Solo Cello (SR 90370) we reviewed in 2010. These days the Oval label pressings from the early 60s almost never sound very good to us. We no longer bother to put them in shootouts.

This record on the Oval Label would be very unlikely to qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing anymore, although we liked it just fine in 2010, as you can see from our old review.

In 2024 we actually put an Oval Label pressing of SR 90370 in a shootout and it did about as poorly as we would have expected. What a waste of time and money. Never again.

Excellent cello reproduction on side one, where you get Bach’s entire Suite No. 2 for Unaccompanied Cello.  Hear how wonderful a cello can sound when recorded and mastered for maximum effect, live in your listening room.

The cutting is super low distortion on this later label copy as well. This copy will show you why these Starker Mercury records are so highly prized.

The sound of Starker’s cello here is humongous — it’ll fill up your room, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. 

It’s also tonally correct from top to bottom, a quality we heard on none of the Mercury Heavy Vinyl reissues we played. They have some of the worst sound we had heard from Speakers Corner up to that time.

This is very much in keeping with the overly rich, overly smooth sound of the Heavy Vinyl records being made today. We despise that sound and want nothing to do with it.

Speakers Corner and the TAS List

Three Mercury recordings of Starker’s on Speakers Corner vinyl are currently on the TAS List, SR 90303, SR 90392 and SR 3-9016. I suppose we could order the first two up, audition them and list their many sonic shortcomings, since we do have nice copies of both albums in the backroom, just not enough to do a shootout. [We have since done shootouts for both.]

NOTE: The 3 LP Box Set is probably never going to go through a shootout. At $1000 and up for an original set, the price we would have to charge for the best of them would be outrageously high.

But there are so many other good pressings to play, why go out of way to play another second- or third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing?

Another Link?

By the way, we have a new link for audiophile pressings that are tonally correct but are wrong in other ways, as they usually are. You can assume that our Hot Stamper pressings are tonally correct for the most part, as correct tonality is fairly key to high quality sound. Not essential, but important nevertheless.

Starker’s records are legendary for their sound, not to mention Starker’s way with this music. If anybody can make Bach’s solo cello pieces capture your interest, Starker can.

Further Reading

Brahms / Sonata in D Minor / Laredo

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND for this incredibly rare Living Stereo violin record.

This is the first Shaded Dog pressomg of LSC 2414 I’ve ever seen. Side one, the Brahms Sonata, has very good sound and is played beautifully. When I dropped the needle on side two I went “Wow!”

The Bach partita for solo violin is incredible sounding. The violin is close-miked and every nuance of the instrument is right there before you. The immediacy of the recording is nothing short of stunning.

To quote from the liner notes, “Jaime calls the Sonatas and Partitas THE most demanding works in the literature. The works lightness and high spirits — the spirit of 17th century dance music — belie its complexity and the enormous technical and interpretive demands it makes of the performer.”

Having this intimate a window onto the piece, I completely agree. It’s a spell-binding work.

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Fullness Is Key on Straight No Chaser

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Thelonious Monk Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our last shootout was in 2020. The copy described below sounding amazing, so we took the time to note a few qualities we heard.

What a recording! If you want to hear just how good Monk’s great big rich piano sounds, look no further. 

Rudy Van Gelder, eat your heart out. Straight, No Chaser has the piano sound Rudy never quite managed.

Some say it’s the crappy workhorse piano he had set up in his studio.

Others say it was just poorly miked.

Rather than speculating on something we know little about (good pianos and the their miking) let’s just say that Columbia had the piano, the room and the mics to do it right as you can easily hear on this very record.

Side Two

Listen to Monk vocalizing — this copy is so resolving you can hear him clearly, yet the overall sound is warm, rich and smooth in the best Columbia tradition.

Speaking of warm, rich and smooth, this is important to the horn sound too. Most copies could not make the sax as full-bodied and free of honk as we would have liked. This one did, earning lots of points in the process. Hard to fault and definitely hard to beat.

Side One

Very clear but as we said above, finding all the fullness is the toughest job in the mastering and pressing of this album. Still, quite good and better than most.

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Piano and Snare Testing with Love Over Gold

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2017 we reviewed a copy of Love Over Gold that really knocked us out. This was sound we had never heard on the album before, so as you can imagine, we had to tell the world -s or at least that small part of the world that accepts the reality of Hot Stamper Pressings — all about it.

Since then we have noted the value of testing albums with pianos and snare drums as those seem to be key part of some recordings that are hard to get right, which of course is makes them good tests.

Telegraph Road does something on this copy that you won’t hear on one out of twenty pressings: It ROCKS. It’s got ENERGY and DRIVE.

Listen to how hard Allan Clark bangs on the piano on side one — he’s pounding that piano with all his might. No other copy managed to get the piano to pop the way it does here, so clear and solid.

Wow, who knew? Maybe this is the reason HP put the record on the TAS Super Disc List. (I rather doubt he’s ever heard a copy this good, but who’s to say?)

Best test for side two?

The snare drum on Industrial Disease. Play five copies of the album and listen on each of them for how much snap there is to the snare. It will be obvious which ones get the transient attack right and which ones don’t. (If none of them do, try five more copies!)

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Letter of the Week – “I felt like I entered another world.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Hi Tom,

I just wanted to thank you at BR for The Pentangle Super Hot Stamper.

Upon listening to it, I felt like I entered another world.

The sound is through the roof and the music blows my mind,

I’m not sure I actually have the words to describe just how beautiful this sound experience really is, so I will leave it at that.

So Many Thanks,
Michel

Michel, I couldn’t agree more. The sound of the Pentangle’s first album is so pure you feel like the barrier between you and the music has disolved and no longer exists.

When a record is so good it lets you lose yourself completely in the music, that is the sign of a very special pressing indeed, in this case of a very special recording.

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Living Strings / Morton Gould and his Orchestra

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I typed so badly back in the early 2000s that it was actually easier to just dictate the short reviews we put up for our records. Rereading this just now made me recall that fact, because it is either poorly written or dictated, and I am going to go with the latter since I hate to think I ever wrote this badly.

As a rule, Moton Gould’s recordings for RCA are not especially good. If you see this title for cheap, pick it up. Otherwise I would give it a pass.

RCA Shaded Dog LP with good sound.

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Caribou Is Usually Noisy and Sounds Bad, But Why?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

There’s a good reason you’ve practically never seen this album for sale on our site. In fact there are quite a number of good reasons.

The first one is bad vinyl — most DJM pressings of Caribou are just too noisy to sell. They can look perfectly mint and play noisy as hell; it’s not abuse, it’s bad vinyl.

Empty Sky is the same way; out and out bad vinyl, full of noise, grit and grain.

The second problem is bad sound. Whether it’s bad mastering or bad vinyl incapable of holding onto good mastering, no one can say. Since so many copies were pressed of this monster Number One album (topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic):

  • Perhaps they pressed a few too many after the stampers were worn out.
  • Or pulled too many stampers off the mother.
  • Or made too many stampers from the father.
  • Or used crap vinyl right from the start.

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Brewer & Shipley / Tarkio

More of the Music of Brewer and Shipley

  • A Tarkio like you’ve never heard, with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this early pressing
  • It’s the rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on any track and you’ll see what we mean
  • “Notable not just for the inclusion of ‘One Toke Over the Line’ but also for the great back porch stoned ambience of the entire recording… Not that it ever takes away from the excellent country-style playing that pops up all over the record.”

Not Really One Toke Over the Line

Please don’t assume that this album has much in the way of uptempo country rockers like One Toke Over the Line, Flying Burrito Brothers style. Nothing could be further from the truth. Practically every other song on the album is better, almost all of them are taken at a slower pace, with none of them having the “poppy” arrangement of that carefully calculated Top Forty hit. The rest of the music on the album, the music you probably don’t know, is much better than the music that you do know if what you know is that song.

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WW, LW, JW? Which Stampers Sound the Best?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2005 we acquired more than a dozen sealed copies of a popular Warner Bros. title, how I don’t remember. (For now we are keeping that title, and even the band that recorded it, a mystery. It might have been The Doobie Brothers, but then again, it might not.)

Our story goes like this:

Knowing that no two of these pressings would sound exactly the same, we decided to crack them open, clean them up and play them.

2005 was very early in the development of Hot Stamper Shootouts. By 2007 we were much better at them, and not coincidentally, that is also the year we decided that Heavy Vinyl pressings were just not good enough for us to bother selling.

All three of the major stamper prefixes for Warners were represented in the various matrix numbers: WW, JW and LW. Once we started to play them it quickly became clear that most copies of this record just do not sound very good.

The typical copy is hard, midrangy, opaque, dull and badly lacks Tubey Magic.

Only one of the prefixes — WW, JW, LW — actually has any hope of sounding good, and surprisingly it’s not the one I would have expected it to be. Live and learn, right?

We liked either JW or WW back in 2005, I don’t remember which, but the evidence we compiled over the ensuing twenty years contradicted that finding.

Live and learn is right, because since the dark days of 2005, we have done this shootout many times, at least five by my count, and it turns out that the stampers we tend to like are exactly the ones we tend to like in general for Warner Bros.

Here is the full stamper sheet from a shootout we did not long ago laying out the stampers we like for this mystery title: LW, with low numbers.

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How Good Are the Domestic Pressings of Days of Future Passed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and the good early imports, you know that the imports just murder the American LPs.

Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, so they tend to sound dubby and smeary, yet strangely they’re also thinner and more transistory than the UK imports, and overall have a fraction of the Tubey Magic that make the good imports such an engaging listening experience.

Moody Blues albums on import are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for these problems. But the properly mastered copies are none of these things.

The cutting engineers who cut the pressings for the U.S. market thought they knew exactly how to fix the problem. When the album came out in America in 1968, leaner and cleaner were in and rich and tubey were out.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super-clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for.

It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the recording with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes. In our experience only the best UK pressings can give you the sound.

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